Don't you hate it when it all finally comes to an end? The National Hockey League did its very best to stretch the season out well into the summer – had the Stanley Cup finals stuck to their original schedule the campaign would still be going now – but even a series that goes to the promised land of game seven must eventually end.

What does it all mean? Well, it means that the Pittsburgh Penguins are the best ice hockey team in the world (as distinct from world champions, which they emphatically are not, despite what many commentators insist on saying). It also means that your correspondent here in London can, for the summer at least, finally go to bed at a respectable hour. For once, the NHL is not taking place in my front room at 3.10 in the morning.

So how were the 2009 Stanley Cup finals for you? For me, they were frantic. I watched game one from my home here in Camden. I then flew to Toronto and had trouble finding a bar that was showing game two – with commentary, if you please – so was forced to watch it in my hotel room. The next morning I got hit by a car while out running down by the Air Canada Centre – the only action the ACC has seen during the play-offs – and somehow I contrived to miss game three because I was watching the Toronto Blue Jays play baseball. Back in London for game four, by game five I had written off the Penguins only for the Pennsylvanians to win game six and thus ruin my planned Friday night drinking session that coincided with game seven.

Ah, game seven. Is there anything as beautiful, or as horrible, in all of North American sports? In reaching the Stanley Cup finals for two consecutive years, the Red Wings and the Penguins have each played something like 200 games of hockey in the past two years. This excludes pre-season games, which are like normal games but with more fighting. The Penguins even started this season in Stockholm, some miles away from the Steel City. Yet there they were, nine months on, all ready for a Friday night match-up in America's most terrifying city.

Detroit had seemed to be a place of which the Penguins were frightened. Without being slapped around the ice as they were in the first two games of last year's series, this time the Penguins left Motown after a 5–0 humiliation and headed home for game three without a win. Yes, they looked better, but so what? The statisticians began to chatter: of 32 teams who had skated out to a 2-0 lead in the Stanley Cup finals, 31 had gone on to lift the cup. Who but a fool would bet against Detroit?

What's more, to overturn this daunting stat the Pens would need to win at least one game on the road. So as long as the Red Wings held their home nerve the cup would be theirs. So according to the script, Detroit would, for the second consecutive year, lift the Stanley Cup – the first team to win back-to-back titles since they themselves did so just over a decade ago.

But no one had accounted for the will of the Penguins. During his fitness workouts during the summer, Sidney Crosby had taped up a picture of the Red Wings celebrating their triumph at last year's finals (and doing so on Pittsburgh ice, no less) on the wall of the gym. Whenever he felt like taking a break he would see this picture and give that little bit extra. So too, it seems, did the rest of the side that he has so ably led to their first championship since 1992. When Crosby was forced by injury to sit out the final parts of Friday's game, his team-mates picked up the strain. In doing so they did to the Red Wings what for two years the Red Wings had done to others: they exhausted them, then strangled the life out of them.

I'm struck by two things from the series. One is the sight of Marian Hossa, a player who has now found himself on the losing team in the Stanley Cup finals for two years on the bounce. What's worse, Hossa actually rejected a deal from Pittsburgh in favour of less favourable terms from Detroit because he thought he'd stand a better chance if his uniform were coloured red. Let's all spare a thought for Marian. Come on, no laughing.

But my favourite sight was of Pittsburgh's Bill Guerin, who at the start of this year found himself playing for the New York Islanders, a team so bad that I've got more chance of winning the Stanley Cup than they have. But at the trade deadline Bill went to Pennsylvania, and became a contender.

I have a friend who works the ice at Madison Square Garden, and earlier this season Guerin asked my friend if his kid could ride the Zamboni after the Islanders had played the Rangers there. As a way of saying thanks, the player then gave my friend a used hockey stick. Being a Rangers fan, my friend obviously hung this stick in his toilet. But nonetheless, the ice man remains impressed, by Bill Guerin and his manners.

So I am pleased for Guerin that he has won the Stanley Cup, and I'm somewhat pleased that he's done so with the Pittsburgh Penguins. The internet forecasters – not this one, I don't know anything – are already wondering whether Pittsburgh versus Detroit will be the match-up for next season's Stanley Cup finals. All I can say is, I do hope not. It's all well and good for sportscasters to talk about dynasties and legacies, about superstars or phenomenons, but, me, I like a bit of variety. I like to see evidence that a salary cap is actually working. I like to see a season start and not have any inkling of how it might end.

Next year I would like to see the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Los Angeles Kings duke it out for right to hoist the Stanley Cup into the air and proclaim the NHL the best league in North American sports.